1. Link Building Strategies
1.1. Get customers to link to you
1.2. Build a company blog. Make it a valuable, informative and entertaining resource
1.3. Create content that inspires viral sharing and natural linking
1.4. Be newsworthy.
1.5. Find directories or listings of relevant resources.
2. How Search Engine Operates
2.1. Crawling & Indexing
2.1.1. Each stop is its own unique document (usually a web page, but sometimes a PDF, JPG or other file). The search engines need a way to “crawl” the entire city and find all the stops along the way, so they use the best path available – links.
2.1.2. Through links, search engines’ automated robots, called “crawlers,” or “spiders” can reach the many billions of interconnected documents.
2.2. Providing Answer
2.2.1. Search engines are answer machines. When a person looks for something online, it requires the search engines to scour their corpus of billions of documents and do two things – first, return only those results that are relevant or useful to the searcher’s query, and second, rank those results in order of perceived usefulness. It is both “relevance” and “importance” that the process of SEO is meant to influence.
2.3. Popularity
2.3.1. Currently, the major engines typically interpret importance as popularity – the more popular a site, page or document, the more valuable the information contained therein must be.
3. Why Search Engine Optimization
3.1. Attract More Visitors
3.2. Attract New Visitors
3.3. Without SEO, many websites remain invisible to search engines. SEO allows webmasters to provide "clues" that the search engines can use to understand content.
4. Primary Responsibility
4.1. To serve relevant results to their users
5. Growing popularity and links
5.1. Link Signals
5.1.1. Global Popularity
5.1.1.1. The more popular and important a site is, the more links from that site matter. A site like Wikipedia has literally 1000's of diverse sites linking to it, which means it's probably a popular and important site. To earn trust and authority with the engines, you'll need the help of other link partners.
5.1.2. Local/Topic-Specific Popularity
5.1.2.1. This suggests that links from sites within a topic-specific community matter more than links from general or off-topic sites. For example, if your website sells dog houses, earning links from the Society of Dog Breeders matters much more than earning links from an off-topic, roller skating site.
5.1.3. Anchor Text
5.1.3.1. If dozens of links point to a page with the right keywords, that page has a very good probability of ranking well for the targeted phrase in that anchor text.
5.1.4. TrustRank
5.1.4.1. In order to weed out irrelevant content, search engines use systems for measuring trust, many of which are based on the link graph. Earning links from highly trusted domains can result in a significant boost to this scoring metric.
5.1.5. Link Neighborhood
5.1.5.1. A website that links to spam is likely spam itself, and in turn often has many spam sites linking back to it. By looking at the totality of these links in aggregate, search engines can understand the "link neighborhood" your website exists in. Thus, it's wise to choose those sites you link to carefully and be equally selective with the sites you attempt to earn links from.
5.1.6. Freshness
5.1.6.1. Earn additional links over time
5.1.7. Social Sharing
5.1.7.1. The last few years has seen an explosion in the amount of content shared through social services such as Facebook, Twitter and Google+. Although search engines treat socially shared links differently than other types of links, they notice them nonetheless. There is much debate among search professionals as to how exactly search engines factor social link signals into their algorithm, but there is no denying the rising importance of social channels.
5.2. Link Acquisition
5.2.1. "Natural" Editorial Links
5.2.1.1. Links that are given naturally by sites and pages that want to link to your content or company. These links require no specific action from the SEO, other than the creation of worthy material (great content) and the ability to create awareness about it.
5.2.2. Manual "Outreach" Link Building
5.2.2.1. The SEO creates these links by emailing bloggers for links, submitting sites to directories, or paying for listings of any kind. The SEO often creates a value proposition by explaining to the link target why creating the link is in their best interest.
5.2.3. Self-Created, Non-Editorial
5.2.3.1. Hundreds of thousands of websites offer any visitor the opportunity to create links through guest book signings, forum signatures, blog comments, or user profiles. These links offer the lowest value, but can, in aggregate, still have an impact for some sites.
6. How People interact with search engine
6.1. Built for users, not search engines.
6.1.1. Types of search queries users generally perform
6.1.1.1. "Know" Informational Queries - When a user seeks information, such as the name of the band or the best restaurant in New York City.
6.1.1.2. "Do" Transactional Queries - Action queries such as buy a plane ticket or listen to a song.
6.1.1.3. "Go" Navigation Queries - Search queries that seek a particular online destination, such as Facebook or the homepage of the NFL.
7. The basic of Search friendly Design & development
7.1. Indexable content
7.1.1. 1. Images in gif, jpg, or png format can be assigned “alt attributes” in HTML, providing search engines a text description of the visual content.
7.1.2. 2. Search boxes can be supplemented with navigation and crawlable links.
7.1.3. 3. Flash or Java plug-in contained content can be supplemented with text on the page.
7.1.4. 4. Video & audio content should have an accompanying transcript if the words and phrases used are meant to be indexed by the engines.
7.2. URL Construction Guidlines
7.2.1. Employ Empathy
7.2.2. Shorter is better
7.2.3. Keyword use is important (but overuse is dangerous)
7.2.4. Go static
7.2.5. Use hyphens to separate words
8. Page Ranking Factor
8.1. Keyword Usage and Targeting
8.2. Keyword Domination
8.3. Page Optimization
8.3.1. Keyword in Title Tags
8.3.2. Keyword in text
8.3.3. Meta description tag
8.4. Crawlable Link Structure
9. Keyword Research
9.1. Judge the Value of a Keyword
9.1.1. To understand the value of a keyword, we need to understand our own websites, make some hypotheses, test, and repeat - the classic web marketing formula.
9.1.1.1. Ask yourself...
9.1.1.2. Search for the term/phrase in the major engines
9.1.1.3. Buy a sample campaign for the keyword at Google AdWords and/or Bing Adcenter
9.2. Understanding the Long Trail of Keyword Demand
9.2.1. Understanding the search demand curve is critical. To the right we've included a sample keyword demand curve, illustrating the small number of queries sending larger amounts of traffic alongside the volume of less-searched terms and phrases that bring the bulk of our search referrals.
9.3. Resources
9.3.1. Google Adwords’ Keyword Tool
9.3.2. Google Insights for Search
9.3.3. Google Trends Keyword Demand Prediction
9.3.4. Microsoft Advertising Intelligence
9.3.5. Wordtracker’s Free Basic Keyword Demand
9.4. Keyword Difficulty
9.4.1. In order to know which keywords to target, it's essential to not only understand the demand for a given term or phrase, but also the work required to achieve those rankings. If big brands take the top 10 results and you're just starting out on the web, the uphill battle for rankings can take years of effort. This is why it's essential to understand keyword difficulty.